Background on the Opioid Crisis in America

The United States opioid epidemic is a nationwide public health crisis. Initially driven by increased consumption and availability of pharmaceutical opioids such as oxycontin, an increasing number of opioid overdoses are now related to heroin and illicitly manufactured fentanyl and fentanyl analogs. Deaths related to opioid use have sharply increased from 1996 when advertisement around opioid based pharmaceuticals became unrestricted.

Research Questions

I wanted to look at the steady increase in opioid-related deaths in the US, to visualize this I used a simple line graph plotting the data from 1990 to 2019. I also compared opioid related deaths to other drug related deaths in the US along the same time scale, initially just alcohol but then also cocaine and amphetamine. As my final research question I wanted to plot the data spatially by looking at how opioid related deaths have differed across different US states. However, I wanted to keep the temporal aspect of the data, so therefore I made a data file for every year with every states opioid-related death rate

Data Sources

All the data was sourced from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation